Testing week

15/11/2012 00:00

On the first page of this website I stated that this blog came into life because of a testing week. I didn't explain what that means so far. Now, I suppose, is the right time. First let me introduce you to the vision behind the testing week:

"For agile programmers and testers who are interested in testing methods for real products, the testing week provides a possibility to observe the testing techniques of another tester, to discover new testing techniques and to gain ideas for one's own work. In contrast to one's daily work it is possible to learn unfamiliar testing techniques and to see them applied to examples. In contrast to training-movies the testing week is all about real tests with real products developed in Germany"

At this point I'm already interested in feedback. If you have any thoughts about this, please drop to the bottom of the page and provide some feedback before you come back up here and continue. It would be helpful to know if and how this vision appeals to you.

The testing week is an idea that changed over time and was created by my colleagues Bernd Schiffer, Christian Dähn and me. First Bernd and I thought about ways in which I could improve my testing skills. Soon we came to the idea of testing dojos once a day in strict timeboxes for some time. As we went on, we came to the title "30 products in 30 days". A whole month I should test a product each day to gain experience. With this nice title it was easy to think about making this project public and blog about it. As there is only a small community of agile testers in Germany, we also wanted to use this blog series to wake up some testers to join the community and improve our skills together. We also thought about whose products to test. The conclusion was that we wanted German products to be tested. After each session there would not only be a blogpost but a short wrap-up of the debriefing for the developing company. This way we thought that more companies would realize that Agile Testing could be useful for them as well.

Shortly after that the idea was still in my head but I didn't begin with the project. It seemed to me as if there was always something preventing me from starting. One evening, weeks after my first conversation with Bernd, I talked about it with Christian. Maybe the 30 days were actually too long to begin with. I was stuck because the effort seemed too big to me even though it looked like fun to me. So we shortened it to 7 days of testing and called it testing week.

But still I felt like I couldn't start. Bernd told me to think of the vision behind it and to make it explicit. You find the result of almost a month of vision-searching up there! Now I'm lacking feedback if somebody is actually interested in this project. So, if you would be interested, just drop me a line :o)